Learning translation-based knowledge graph embeddings by n-pair translation loss

Translation-based knowledge graph embeddings learn vector representations of entities and relations by treating relations as translation operators over the entities in an embedding space. Since the translation is represented through a score function, translation-based embeddings are trained in general by minimizing a margin-based ranking loss, which assigns a low score to positive triples and a high score to negative triples. However, this type of embedding suffers from slow convergence and poor local optima because the loss adopts only one pair of a positive and a negative triple at a single update of learning parameters. Therefore, this paper proposes the N-pair translation loss that considers multiple negative triples at one update. The N-pair translation loss employs multiple negative triples as well as one positive triple and allows the positive triple to be compared against the multiple negative triples at each parameter update. As a result, it becomes possible to obtain better vector representations rapidly. The experimental results on link prediction prove that the proposed loss helps to quickly converge toward good optima at the early stage of training.